As 2023 draws to an end, for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak 2024 is likely to start with the same old issue: Trying but failing to stop the small boats from ferrying migrants or asylum seekers to British shores. Even if his plan to send a few of them to Rwanda gets the go-ahead in Parliament next year, it is increasingly clear that immigration and refugee problems are here to stay, not only in Britain but across Europe.

Many nations are grappling with an uncontrollable influx that has been overwhelming the public debate and enabling more far-right parties to enter parliaments and governments, normalizing as a result the hard-line, populist, inflammatory narrative on migration. This has now become mainstream, with no reasonable attempts made to find a common denominator that would allow a sober review and reform of asylum and immigration laws.

After meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to push for global reforms to the asylum system, Sunak warned that the number of migrants could soon “overwhelm” Europe, in a speech the British Conservative Party leader delivered to a gathering of Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party. In it, he warned that some “enemy” states were deliberately “driving people to our shores to try and destabilize our societies.” Though he stopped short of repeating ex-US President Donald Trump’s claim that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country,” Sunak instead insisted that tackling this problem “requires us to update our laws and lead the international conversation to amend the postwar frameworks around asylum.”

The British PM — under fire at home from his own party, let alone an electorate fed up with Conservative Party chaos — hailed Meloni’s approach to tackling illegal migration, while announcing that they had agreed to co-fund a project to help return migrants to their home countries from Tunisia.

Though few details have emerged about the Tunisia plan, it seems to me that it is another attempt to throw taxpayers’ money at a complex problem, wishing it would make it disappear. Sunak and Meloni’s own policies are already facing strong criticism; the former for his plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and the latter for her efforts to limit the activities of charity rescue ships in the Mediterranean.

The UK’s proposed Rwanda scheme, first formulated in April 2022 by then-PM Boris Johnson, was designed to deter migrants from making the dangerous journey across the English Channel from France and to break the business model of people smugglers. Under the plan, anyone who arrived illegally in the UK after Jan. 1, 2022, faced being deported to Rwanda. However, the first flights were blocked by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights, which the UK Supreme Court last month endorsed. The ruling was based on safety grounds, for fear of returning asylum seekers being sent by Rwanda to other unsafe countries. London has already paid Rwanda £240 million ($304 million) for the scheme, which has a maximum capacity of 500 asylum seekers at best.

Many nations are grappling with an uncontrollable influx that has been overwhelming the public debate

Mohamed Chebaro

A new emergency Rwanda bill tabled by Sunak’s government has drawn criticism from all tribes of the ruling Conservative Party, as well as the opposition. It aims to address the Supreme Court ruling preventing anyone from being sent anywhere other than back to Britain and affirm that Rwanda is a safe country. It disapplies sections of Britain’s Human Rights Act and gives ministers the final say on whether to comply with European Court of Human Rights injunctions.

The desire to curb immigration has long been a rallying point for the British right and far right, with “taking back control” of the country’s borders and ending freedom of movement key factors in the UK’s 2016 vote to leave the EU. It remains one of the most important issues for voters. But successive governments over the last 13 years have failed to limit net migration to under 100,000 per year, as the Conservative Party pledged in 2010. In 2022, the number hit 745,000, partly due to new visa rules for arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong.

Sunak believes a raft of measures he announced this month will slash arrival numbers by 300,000 annually, while also hoping that the Rwanda scheme will reduce the number arriving on small boats to under the 45,000 recorded last year.

The idea of sending asylum seekers to a faraway land has long played on the minds of many, as populist leaders consistently magnify the threat migrants present to the native population. It has recently become a way for aspiring leaders to cheaply win votes. But it is not a problem that will simply disappear by adopting half-baked deterrent policies, especially while all the figures point to labor shortages and a need for foreign workers in various sectors of Western economies.

During my decades of reporting on immigration and refugee issues across Europe, this problem has often formed part of the conversation related to the benefits new arrivals bring to nations’ economies, despite the pressure they put on public services that have often been starved due to more than a decade of austerity, such as in the UK. The issue was long used as a political football by competing politicians and political parties.

In recent years, though, rising nationalist anti-immigrant sentiments in the UK and several EU countries, including Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands, have captured the mood. Various far-right political actors have seized this opportunity to increase their capital by promoting a divisive and often hate-charged narrative about migrants. Disgruntled electorates have been misled into believing that controlling migration and asylum trends is the answer to all the ills that have for years challenged their senses of safety and prosperity.

Instead of listening to empty rhetoric that only damages social cohesion and, in many cases, economic sectors that are heavily reliant on migrant workers, countries in Europe and elsewhere should work to improve their filtering and vetting of asylum seekers and illegal migrants, while upholding the tenets of international humanitarian laws. This way, those deemed ineligible can be quickly sent back to their home country or country of transit, while those that remain can be helped to integrate and become positive contributors to their newly adopted society.

• Mohamed Chebaro is a British-Lebanese journalist with more than 25 years’ experience covering war, terrorism, defense, current affairs and diplomacy. He is also a media consultant and trainer.